Tracing the ebb and flow of friendship

If you think you’ve read the story of four friends trying to make it in New York City already, think again. Hanya Yanagihara’s transcendent second novel is much more than its plot summary suggests. A Little Life may be the best book you read this year; it certainly will be the most heartbreaking.

The strange truths of travel and fiction

In her spellbinding debut novel, The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara drew on her life as a well traveled woman and editor at Conde Nast Traveler to compose stunning, visual descriptions of place. In these fictional memoirs of a scientist who has fallen from grace, readers find themselves seduced by a remote jungle setting and all the...

It's been a pleasure serving you

Employees of the hospitality industry—hotel clerks, restaurant workers, valet parkers—have a unique view of two things: how hotels operate and what hotel guests are really like. After 10 years in the business, in jobs ranging from front desk agent to housekeeping manager, Jacob Tomsky offers a peek behind the counter in an...

The stuff nightmares are made of

Colson Whitehead has a problem—a big problem. He can’t stop thinking about zombies, even when he’s asleep.“I’ve been having zombie dreams ever since I saw Dawn of the Dead in seventh grade,” Whitehead says during a call to his home in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. “Some people have anxiety...

A three-ring debut

The Night Circus is the story of two magicians who each select a champion to compete in a decades-long tournament that takes the form of a stranger-than-average circus. As competitors Celia and Marco match wits, and fall in love, the reader becomes equally enamored of the complex, magical world that author Erin Morgenstern has...

The case of the stolen moon rocks

You’ve probably never heard of Thad Roberts, the brilliant young NASA recruit who pulled off one of the most audacious heists in history when he tiptoed out of the Johnson Space Center one rainy Texas night in 2003 with a 600-pound safe containing $20 million in moon rocks.Even Ben Mezrich, the gonzo-inspired biographer of Ivy League geeks...

An author's love letter to books

During Pat Conroy’s sophomore year in high school, a charismatic English teacher told him that he should read 200 pages a day. “I thought he was serious!” Conroy says, laughing, during a call to his home in Beaufort, South Carolina. “So I did that, and I’ve tried to keep it up. Sometimes I don’t make it, but...

Tasting feelings through food

A boy with keys for fingers. A woman who gives birth to her own mother. Imps and mermaids falling in love. If all of this sounds too strange—even for fiction—then you’ve obviously never read anything by Aimee Bender. But now, with the publication of her second novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, it’s...

Retracing an assassin's trail

Memphis historian and subculture explorer Hampton Sides was six years old on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a prison escapee named James Earl Ray.Sides remembers that his father, who worked at the Memphis law firm that represented King during his marches on behalf of the...

Explosive thriller explores secrets of the church

What if a secret society possessed indisputable proof that Christianity in general—and the Catholic Church in particular—are built on historical error? To what extremes might zealous defenders of the faith go to find and destroy such potentially catastrophic evidence? These are the premises that set Dan Brown's absorbing new...